That young children are innately or at any rate, "naturally" selfish is the unexamined, usual assumption of contemporary and past moral theorists and laypersons alike. Our previous research and the implications of several recent reports bring this premise into question on both conceptual and evidentiary grounds. Because this premise has profound but unnoticed ramifications in the ways mental health workers and educators work with children, we think it should be carefully and directly investigated as it has not been. To evaluate this premise and an alternative formulation, we plan an intensive, partly naturalistic two-year study of 50 four year olds, their parents, and teachers. We propose "listening" to these children and their caretakers to test an alternative formulation that young children only appear selfish for several reasons: (a) They are vulnerable to stress because they have little dialogical skill and meage personal, social, and material resources with the consequence that they do fail morally. (b) The historic supposition that children are selfish may generate expectations in some parents that work as self-fulfulling prophecies. (c) The conclusion has almost always been drawn from observations in contexts defined by adults' superior power. In acting power-focused and self-centered children may be reacting no differently than adults do when they are rendered helpless. Therefore we predict moral levels will be higher when children are not stressed, when parents do not think children are innately selfish, and when children are in child-defined contexts. Families will be classified according to their methods of group regulation to test the idea that family moral exchanges build children's skills and expectancies about how to participate in moral dialogues and what the outcomes of dialogues are likely to be. We propose collecting data from school and home, within child-and adult-defined contexts, and as self-reports or observations. The child-based data would be individual interviews, observations at school, and peer group argumentations; parent-child data would include family discussions; parent data would include separate and joint interviews and parent-reported anecdotes; teacher data would include anecdotes and ratings of their students. To address development questions. Some measures will be repeated.